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. Legal ethics

Bad blogger – please accept this potpourri like sprinkling of items

The week feels like it is getting away from me, some travel, some work, some personal life, but may be able to write about something more substantive I’ve been meaning to tackle for later this week.  For today, here is a scattershot of stories all of which involve something previously found to be worthwhile enough […]

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. Legal ethics

“Cases Without Counsel” study confirms the obvious but also raises more subtle dilemmas

If all you manage to do was read the headline from the ABA Journal online story today — “Self-represented litigants perceive bias and disadvantage in court process, report finds,” your reaction will likely be limited to “Duh.”  But, there is much more that can be gleaned from this “Cases Without Counsel” study and report that the Institute for […]

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. Legal ethics

Radiolab does the “buried bodies” case

Over the last couple of years, like a lot of other people, I have gotten very into listening to podcasts on my way to and from work and on car trips.  Most of what I spend my time listening to is in the comedic vein (MBMBAM, Judge John Hodgman, You Talking U2 to Me), but […]

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. Legal ethics

APRL’s supplemental advertising overhaul proposal

Back in June 2015, I dedicated a post here to praising APRL’s proposal to streamline ethics rules imposing outdated restrictions on lawyer advertising.  A proposal that recognizes that lots of states currently have advertising restrictions on the books that could not survive a constitutional challenge and that aren’t really even being sought to be enforced and […]

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. Legal ethics

If it ever will come to pass, the states will have to serve as the laboratories.

Two weeks ago, I offered some thoughts on the latest flare-up in the long-running off-and-on ABA exploration of the third-rail of the practice of law: potential non-lawyer ownership/investment in law firms.  This time around, before I could even manage to finish reading all of the comments and try to write some thoughts about the comments, […]

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. Legal ethics

Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, and Seeing If I Can Put a Dent In Figuring Out What Is Next for Law.

When you allow yourself to ponder just how quickly technological advances have changed the daily life of a lawyer, it becomes pretty easy to speculate about just how foreign the daily life of a lawyer 10 years from now will be when compared to what it is today.  When I stop to think about the […]

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. Legal ethics

Independence of professional judgment, and other thoughts spurred by the ABA Commission on the Future of Legal Services

April 2016 has brought another iteration of a seemingly, endless, (yet kind of potentially pointless unless you think the politics of the situation will somehow play out differently from the past) debate: whether some entity within the ABA is attempting to usher into reality a world in which people other than lawyers will be allowed […]

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. Legal ethics

Three updates for the Thursday before Tax Day

Back in September, I wrote a bit about some different perspectives on the purpose of lawyer regulation and commented on a story that discussed a proposal that Colorado had in the works.  On April 7, 2016, The Colorado Supreme Court took action to adopt a new “Preamble” that serves as the introduction to its rules […]

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. Legal ethics

Panama Papers – a worst case scenario for the development of cyber liability law for law firms?

It’s an old adage that bad facts make bad law. In the last few weeks, a good number of pieces were written focusing heightened attention on an issue that many lawyers were already stewing about . . . technological vulnerabilities arising from how lawyers and law firms use (and don’t use) technology.  Most of these […]

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. Legal ethics

ABA Law Connect post-mortem. ♫ Five. Five dollar. Five dollar not long. ♫

This is going to be a short update offered on a Friday for any weekend reading needs you may be facing. A bit back (on Back to the Future day actually) I mentioned (almost as only an aside) the pilot project that the ABA was launching in cooperation with Rocket Lawyer to offer a limited-scope […]